European Capacity Building Initiative

New Policy Report on staffing requirements for managing climate finance

David Ciplet, Benito Müller, and J. Timmons Roberts address the question of whether it is possible to give some estimate of how many people it would need to manage the sorts of sums currently talked about with regards to longer-term climate finance. The paper does not aim to establish a universal correlation of staff per unit of funding but simply a lower-bound estimate. It concludes that given the current funding portfolios and management activities (in ODA), it takes at least 250 people to manage $1billion. This conservative estimate simply reflects the fact that managing funds properly requires people. The key message of the paper is that the only way to do so effectively, efficiently, and at scale is to delegate as much as possible to recipient countries.